Trinity Church, Princeton and Slavery: A Brief Introduction

 Trinity Church, Princeton and Slavery, a Brief Introduction

Address Delivered by Kyra Pruszinski, March 25, 2023[1]

Stations of Reparations Service, St. Peter’s Church, Freehold, New Jersey

 

During the colonial era, the Princeton preaching station,[2] which laid some of the groundwork for the later founding of Trinity Church, Princeton, included such devoted loyalist Anglicans as Absalom Bainbridge and Richard Cochran, both of whom kept several Black people enslaved on their nearby plantations.[3] During the Revolution, a Black man enslaved by Bainbridge named “Prime” was confiscated by the revolutionary government and forced to serve in the continental army. He did not finally escape threats to his legal freedom until the New Jersey legislature intervened through a post-war legislative act to clarify his legal status.[4]

 

“Dr. Absalom Bainbridge.” Artist: James Sharples, 1752-1811. Courtesy: Frick Digital Collections.

 

Trinity was later established in 1833 in large part through the initiative and donations of the Stockton and Potter families, who remained the parish’s most influential members through the Civil War.[5] Both families enslaved people on their family estates in the Princeton area, as well as on their plantations in the state of Georgia. Senator Robert Field Stockton continued his family’s practice of enslaving people at their Morven estate in New Jersey until at least 1829, and possibly until 1839. He also owned a sugar plantation in Brunswick, Georgia on which at least 108 Black people were enslaved in 1830. His father-in-law, John Potter, and Potter’s sons James and Thomas Fuller, owned and managed the Coleraine Tweedside plantation in Georgia, where at least 423 people were enslaved.[6] The Stockton and Potter families profited directly from the exploitation of enslaved Black people, and donated large sums of that money to sustain Trinity Church. They controlled the affairs of the church, including the hiring of priests, through the end of the Civil War.[7] 

 

Mathew Benjamin Brady, Hon. Robert F. Stockton, N.J - NARA - 526010 (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0

 

In addition to enslaving people, both Robert Stockton and John Potter supported the work of the American Colonization Society. The Society was an ostensibly anti-slavery organization, but promoted principles of White supremacy, race essentialism, and segregation, seeking to send freed Black people to Africa. Stockton and Potter spearheaded the establishment of the New Jersey chapter of the Society in 1824,[8] and Robert Stockton led the American military campaign to subdue native Africans and conquer African lands for the ACS colonial project that would become the nation of Liberia. 

 

Detail of “John Potter” by Thomas Sully, (1783-1872), oil on canvas. Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum. 

Trinity’s first five priests, hand-picked by the Stocktons and Potters, were also implicated in the institution of slavery. The first rector, Reverend George Emlen Hare,[9] inherited money from slavery[10] and kept Black servants.[11] His successor, Rev. Andrew Bell Paterson,[12] was from an influential family of enslavers[13] and oversaw the founding of a segregated school for Black children at Trinity.[14] This school was created to ensure Black children would have White teachers and to keep Black students out of the Princeton public school run by Betsey Stockton, a free Black woman formerly enslaved by the Stockton family.[15]

 

Schreiber & Son, Betsey Stockton, marked as public domain,
more details on Wikimedia Commons

The third rector, Rev. Joshua Peterkin,[16] enslaved Black people himself[17] and continued oversight of the segregated Trinity school. 

 

The Rev. Joshua Peterkin, courtesy of the Diocese of Maryland.

            The fourth rector, Rev. William Hanson,[18] was Peterkin’s brother-in-law, and did not appear to disrupt these patterns of relations at the church.[19] Trinity’s fifth rector, Rev. William Armstrong Dod, who served through the end of the Civil War,[20] was Robert Stockton’s son-in-law and brother to the high-profile enslaver and slavery apologist Albert Baldwin Dod.[21] Records suggest that Rev. Dod did not publicly disagree with his brother’s beliefs until the 1870s,[22] that is, well after his brother’s, and Stockton’s deaths, after he had retired, and after slavery had already been made illegal throughout the United States 

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[1] Text by Kyra Pruszinski, based on her research at Trinity Church, Princeton in cooperation with Abigail Edwards and Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

[2] It was visited and supported by priests assigned to St. Michael’s Church in Trenton.

[3] James Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 31-33, 60.

[4] Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, p. 32.

[5] See Robert Field Stockton and John R. Thomson, “Subscription Book of 1827 to Build a Protestant Episcopal Church in the Borough of Princeton,” August 16, 1827. See also, The Rector, Wardens and Vestrymen of Trinity Church in the Borough of Princeton, “Certificate of Incorporation,” May 17, 1833. MSS held at Trinity Church, Princeton archives.

[6] These facts are represented in the U.S. Census data. See the compilation by Abigail Edwards, “Trinity’s Founding Fathers,” (2022). MSS held at Trinity Church, Princeton archives.

[7] “If ever there was a ‘family church,’ it was Trinity during the more than three decades of active Stockton-Potter dominance from 1833 into the 1860s.” Nathaniel Burt, “The First Rectors: 1834-1866,” in Trinity Church Princeton, New Jersey: A History in Celebration of 150 Years 1833 to 1983 (Princeton, N.J.: Barracks Press, 1988), p. 12.

[8] Society of the American Colonization Society in New Jersey, “Proceedings of a Meeting Held at Princeton, New Jersey, July 14, 1824 to Form a Society in the State of New Jersey to Cooperate with the American Colonization Society,” July 24, 1824. MSS held at Trinity Church, Princeton archives.

[9] He served from 1834-1843.

[10] He was a scion of some of the oldest Philadelphia families, including the Willings and the Emlens, who derived significant wealth from slavery. See, for example, regarding Thomas Willing’s participation in the slave trade: Darold D. Wax, “Africans on the Delaware: The Pennsylvania Slave Trade, 1759-1765,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 50.1 (1983): 38-49; See also: https://foundersandslavery.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/updated-robert-morris/.

[11] As U.S. Census records of Princeton during his tenure (1840) indicate.

[12] He served from 1844-1851.

[13] The city of Paterson is named for his grandfather, one of New Jersey’s first U.S. Senators who, though ostensibly opposed to slavery, enslaved multiple Blacks during his lifetime, including while participating in the constitutional convention.

[14] Burt, “The First Rectors,” p. 15.

[15] See, among other accounts, Constance K. Escher, She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton: The Illustrated Odyssey of a Princeton Slave (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2022).

[16] He served from 1852-1855.

[17] See Mary Klein, “From the Archives: Bishop Whittingham’s Questionnaire of 1844 – Survey Says…,” August 19, 2020, available at: https://marylandepiscopalian.org/2020/08/19/from-the-archives-bishop-whittinghams-questionnaire-of-1844-survey-says/.

[18] He served from 1855-1859.

[19] Accounts of his rectorship suggest he was “unobtrusive.” See Nathaniel Burt, “The First Rectors,” p. 18.

[20] He served from 1859-1866.

[21] See Jessica R. Mack, “Albert Dod,” available at: https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/albert-dod.

[22] See William Armstrong Dod, Paul of Tarsus: An Inquiry into the Times and the Gospel of the Apostle of the Gentiles (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), pp. 194ff.